God Envy
Ariadne's Thread
Ariadne's thread was a string that could be used by the rational, scientific intellect to retrace the
steps of consciousness from figments, like dreams and beliefs, back through the levels of experience to the brain's biochemical substrate where truth could be found. Before proceeding on this mission, Wilson admits on page 70 that consilience is much more successful at taking things apart than putting them together. Consilience by reduction is easy, consilience by synthesis is hard.
Wilson used Ariadne's thread to trace a mystical vision of a pre-scientific jungle dweller back to its causative brain-function. We turn now to Jivaro, the forest-dweller. Jivaro takes a drug from a sacred plant and has a vision of his soul (Jivaro is a deist, though the freest!) entering his body. The vision gives him heightened bravery and "grace."
Remember, Wilson believed all religious experience to be a brain effect and all religion to be mythology in the service of adaptive genetic reproduction. Rational scientists know that no plants are sacred and that Jivaro's drug-induced visions serve to make him a more fit aggressor for the ultimate and sole purpose of his trippy life, which is to reproduce his genes. Recall that in the last decade of the Awakener's life, many young Americans used drugs to counterfeit spiritual experience. The Awakener warned against this practice. But for Wilson, as a scientolator, all religious experience was brain based. He recognized no ultimate difference between drug-based or prayer based religious experience. However, Jivaro, was a good specimen for Wilson to make his case that all religious experience is brain based. As a member of a society that practiced a primitive deistic religion, Jivaro had an excuse for taking drugs. Americans did not. Nevertheless Wilson was understanding of what he termed the "innocent faith" of the 1960s and 70s that God could be found in a pill. the drug taking of that era was neither innocent nor spiritual. It was a symptom of the end of the cycle.
Wilson placed all theology and spirituality in the category of mythology. He did not distinguish between nature religions whose rites involved drug use and the Avataric faiths such as Christianity, which actually defined his own mode of life, although he did not know it.
Wilson discussed the biochemistry of dreams and visions. He believed that all dreams and visions, even those of saints, would one day be completely demythologized and understood, perhaps even to the point of full predictability. One day, science would achieve the knowledge of biochemical specificity of vision-content. Wilson's discussion of demythologizing spiritual vision ignores a vast historical fact and one that indicates the true evolution of the soul's journey to the Oversoul. We now understand that grand spiritual evolution from deism to theism, from love to longing, enabled and uplifted humanity to leave drug-induced trances as a means of communicating with God.
Wilson did not recognize spiritual evolution, only material
evolution. None of the widely practiced Avataric religions predominating in
1998—Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity or Islam—incorporated
drug hallucinations into their rites. It is a historical fact that American
Indians, who had been natural deists, had to sue at law for the right to use
certain drugs in religious practice. Wilson chose an example of extremely rare
and obsolete mystical experience to make his case. He could not explore the
longing for God unseen, which predominated in 1998.
Scientific materialism did not recognize degrees of sacredness of love. Love was a biologically adaptive condition of the central nervous system. Biologically adaptive in different ways, for instance physical love had a different biological purpose than altruistic love, but there was no ultimate difference in significance.
Page 87 Wilson took the universal fear of snakes of the Old Humanity as an example of "prepared learning." Fear of snakes is adaptive for survival and present throughout the animal kingdom. It is also an excellent example of the divine impulse overcoming evolutionary learning.
Fear is genetically prepared and only a very slight, incidental exposure to a genetically prepared fearful object, such as a snake, instills permanent aversion. Wilson mentions that the age of seven appears to be a point in the lifespan when these genetically prepared fears are established in consciousness. The Awakener explained that the karma associated with a human lifespan is "set" at about the age of six or seven.
I say the master problem, because the most complex systems known to exist in the universe are biological, and by far the most complex of all biological phenomena is the human mind. If brain and mind are at base biological phenomena, it follows that the biological sciences are essential to achieving coherence among all the branches of learning, from the humanities on down to the physical science.
Scientific materialism concluded that the mind is a product of the brain, and the brain is the site for understanding the meaning of life. The goal of this search was to find the biochemical basis of mental effects like God, truth, faith, compassion.
The phenomenon of time. Wilson distinguishes three time scales: biochemical, organismic, ecological. He did not recognize phenomena beyond time.
Wilson stacked the sciences through which he believed consilience would explicate all meaning of life:
- evolutionary biology
- ecology
- organismic biology
- cellular biology
- molecular biology
- biochemistry
Religion, culture, the humanities are artifacts of evolutionary biology at
the top of the pyramid. Wilson believed that reductionism was the only way to
build that edifice of knowledge. He conceded that it had only succeeded in achieving
predictive knowledge at the lowest level of the stack.
The Great Purification was a time of renewed viral plagues and ecological catastrophe. As knowledge of molecular biology was swiftly expanding organismic biology could not even begin to keep pace with the viral plagues being spun off by the unnaturalness of Wilson's time. One perspective blames those plagues on scientific experimentations gone awry and unprecedented contact between humans and other animal species.
On the organismic biology level of the pyramid, there was good news and bad news during the Great Purification. Viral plagues, cancer, and all the plagues of unnaturalness were worsening, even though scientific knowledge had done a great deal to improve the human condition. The knowledge of molecular and cellular biology, especially of bacteria and sanitation, had improved life for billions. But on the level of ecology there were worldwide disasters which I will not catalog here. Still Wilson placed all his faith in science.
On the top level, evolutionary biology, the genetic engineering of the Great Purification was disastrous, catastrophic. From the perspective of the Theme of Creation, the purpose of evolutionary biology was fulfilled with the arrival of human consciousness, but the infinite varieties of intelligence and culture—religion, arts and humanities resulting from the third narrative of creation, reincarnation—will never stop evolving.
Page 93 The final test of scientific consilience was believed to be the power to artificially reproduce life, and ultimately the most neurologically complex form which is human. God-envy drove them to this. Wilson accepted doctrines of human disposability upon which this craving was based. The doctrine of disposability of the youngest human beings had been established during the 20th century. It was a practical necessity for Wilson's aim of artificial reproduction, a pretext for total power over human life. Rational, scientific principles could justly be applied to choices about which humans should be allowed to live and which could be discarded. This doctrine of disposability was overwhelmingly accepted by the science of the Great Purification.
The greatest challenge today, not just in cell biology and ecology but in all science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems.
Wilson restated his hope that science can become predictive through biochemistry and molecular biology. Their reductive science could only predict the simplest biological phenomena. The longing for predictive power during the Great Purification was in part due to lack of faith in God. Unnatural religious experience compelled humanity to wrest control over the physical world because God was either too indifferent or nonexistent. This was the core unnatural faith of scientific materialism, we are alone in a pointless universe and have to solve our problems for ourselves.
Wilson wrote that non-predictability of scientific was due to
complexity. But in a sense, non-predictability was inevitable given the reductionist
approach. As complexity increases reduction becomes increasingly useless. Recognizing
this inherent limitation in reductionism, Stephen Wolfram in 2002 introduced
a new kind of science that explained complexity as resulting from the
repetition of relatively simple rules. Unlike scientolatry, this formulation had profound
implications for the science to come.
Whether through reductive or inductive science, we do not see predictive power
as an end in itself to be a legitimate goal of science. Because we are not materially
restless like the Old Humanity, our science tends to be purely theoretical.
The aim of providing a pleasant sufficiency to everyone has been accomplished.
While we still have a few diseases, our lives are healthy and we live out a
natural life expectancy of about 80 years. Our rate of reproduction is much
lower than theirs because our instinctual karma has been lightened and we no
longer have separative religion exhorting us to have large families.
Page 94 Wilson mentioned the fallacy of affirming the consequent: it is wrong to assume that because a correct result was obtained by means of a theory that the steps used to obtain it are necessarily the same as those that obtain in the real world.
Scientific materialism was a gigantic fallacy of the consequent. Because a correct result was obtained from the theory of natural selection, natural selection was assumed to be the final and only means—and even the purpose—of consciousness.
Page 99 The God-envy of the Great Purification takes us briefly to the worst aspect of scientific materialism. Artificial human reproduction was a major focus of science during the Great Purification. We look back on the human agriculture of their so-called "test-tube" babies . . . Wilson lays out the royal road of artificial reproduction for a world exploding with bodies being created for souls flooding into the earth at that pivotal time. The last thing Earth needed was more bodies, but scientific materialism did not have a conviction that human life was sacred, rather that science would provide control over the body for those lives selected according to rational, atheistic criteria.
Biologists have refined reductionism into a high art and have begun to achieve partial synthesis at the level of the molecule and organelle. Even if complete cells and organisms are still beyond them, they know they can reconstruct some of the elements one at a time. They foresee no need for overarching grand explanations as a prerequisite for creating artificial life. An organism is a machine, and the laws of physics and chemistry, most believe, are enough to do the job, given sufficient time and research funding.
To us those words are dreadfully cold, inhumane. And again I point out that while the deadhearted materialism Wilson so admired may have dismissed "grand overarching explanations" as irrelevant, most people did not. Importantly in Wilson's own words scientific materialism simply foreclosed the grand, overarching questions, they did not resolve them, they ignored them and pretended in an amazing flight of superstition that these questions were irrelevant. But many people did not dismiss these grand questions. They saw what lay ahead, the realities of unnaturally extended lifespans through artificial organs for wealthy people or artificially created human slaves, or killing humans for their body parts. As Wilson said, the scientists had no unchanging spiritual conviction, they wanted to alleviate human problems and they also craved to experience their own power.
Sometimes those days seem hilarious to us. Like two avuncles marrying. Some did marry and some actually purchased test-tube infants. They had such impatient hunger for phenomenal experience barred by the gross body. They tried to live several lives at once, to be man and woman at once. Anomalies of time and reincarnation at the end of the cycle. We now understand the indelible sadness and unnaturalness of artificially created human organisms. We now understand something of sanskaras and know why artificially produced life lacks the happiness of natural life. An unfortunate consequence was that ghosts often took artificially produced bodies in their first incarnations back from ghosthood. The knowledge about their conception was burdensome enough, but compounded with the troubles all ghosts face trying to smooth out the sanskaric distortions of ghosthood, these souls had unnecessarily difficult lives.
The Manifestation removed ¾ of that God-envy (an aspect of anger) from human consciousness. We have not had the desire to artificially produce life above the vegetable kingdom for 200 years, we don't use the bodies of animals for anything and the idea of human agriculture is unthinkable
.
So the important questions are, first, do general organizing principles exist that allow a living organism to be reconstituted in full without recourse to brute force simulation of all its molecules and atoms? Second, will the same principles apply to mind, behavior and ecosystems? Third, is there a body of mathematics that will serve as a natural language for biology, parallel to the one that works so well for physics? Fourth, even if the correct principles are discovered, how detailed must factual models be in order to use those principles in the desired models?
Wilson asked a 4-part question: Can we artificially create life? To those questions posed 314 years ago I long to reach across time and tell my colleague the answers:
1. Yes. Sufficient knowledge was acquired to reconstitute simple life forms.
2. No. Different principles apply to human consciousness due to the operation of God's Wish.
3. Yes. Vast improvements have been achieved in inductive combinatorics, which make the marvelously clever and stuporously complicated methods you advocated outmoded.
4. We no longer care. We see more clearly in the looking glass that God holds to the inner sight. We no longer desire those "living models" as you term them. Our own bodies come into being and pass away the old-fashioned way and are entirely sufficient. We have no need of living imitations. We are a bit less curious than you but much more natural. Science helps to provide us with lovely, simple lives. It does not occur to us to look to science to find the meaning of our lives, any more than you would have looked to drama or geography. We have no need of organic models, most of us cannot imagine what purpose such models would serve and do not like to ponder it.
In making these notes I have lighted on you Professor Wilson, because if I canvassed all of the malignant materialists of your day, the tears would wash me out of the theater where I am to speak. God made us so, He made us free. Some among us think of the Old Humanity as a bridge between animal and human consciousness, as if we, the New Humanity, are the first truly human form. I think you were every bit as human as we are, only you were carrying a crushing weight of maya. We have a much lighter burden. Everything is easy now, everything is light. You experienced the aim of life is to acquire knowledge, we experience the aim of our lives is to love God and the goal of our lives is to realize God.
In the last words of this the chapter you borrowed from the most famous words of St. Paul to the Corinthians, "Now we see, as in a mirror darkly, but on that day we shall see even as He sees us, face to face." When you blessed your own benighted view of the human form with the words of St. Paul, I saw the Rubicon. We make mistakes, we even digress a bit, but we will not return to the depth of your misunderstanding. We can never go back.